“Green” power production from agricultural wastes

16/01/2015

Helbio has announced a technology developing project to produce electricity from harmful olive oil production wastes. Biogas2PEM-FC project was an EU-funded project that Helbio participated and together with partners from Sweden, Spain and UK developed a complete integrated biogas-to-power system. The project started on November 2012 and was successfully completed on November 2014.

The goal of the project was the development of a technology to convert the wastes from the olive oil production into electricity. A three-part subsystem was developed; the primary step is an anaerobic digestion reaction to produce biogas from the olive waste, the second step is a fuel processor (developed by Helbio) to convert the biogas to a hydrogen rich gas (reformate) using the steam reforming process, and the last step -the fuel cell system to generate electricity from the reformate gas. The integrated system has been demonstrated in an olive farm in Adalucia, Spain (cooperative of San Isidro de Loja, Granada).

The partners in the Biogas2PEM-FC project are:

• Helbio, Greece

• Power Cell, Sweden AB (publ), Sweden

• Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Sweden

• Idener, Spain

• Leitat, Spain

• Marches Biogas Ltd, Shropshire, UK.

• INGENOSTRUM, Spain

• FAECA (Andalusian Federation of Agrarian Cooperatives), Spain

The project Biogas2PEM-FC has been EU supported within the SP4 Capacities program.